This article (in the tradition of Keynes) makes the implicit assumption that more leisure is good/brings happiness. (Hence the seeming paradox that rich people - those who should be able to afford more leisure - appear to work more.) I don't think that's true. There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming.
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
That's a misunderstanding of what free time is. Free time isn't unproductive time, its unrestricted time. Free time, if fully exploited, can't be worse than the alternative because you're free to do the alternative if its the best use of your time!
The problem is that people don't know how to use their free time, and so it ends up spent getting high and watching TV. Maybe people would be better at exploiting the time they have if they were allowed free time earlier in life. Kids are pretty good at taking advantage of the time they have, maybe if they were allowed to keep more freedom through to adulthood they'd keep the skill. Maybe if our non-free time weren't so stressful we wouldn't feel the need to use our free time just to unwind. Or maybe its that entertainment has gotten too compelling. I'd rather not believe that people have an innate need to be forced to do whatever they do.
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain.
I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
In hunter-gatherer times, I would hunt so my family could eat. If I hunt from 9 to 5 and didn't catch anything, I would have to keep hunting, or my family would go hungry. Nature is not a fair employer, it does not give meat to me because I worked 8 hours. I only get the meat if I catch it.
Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.
My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.
Keynes didn't make the implicit assumption that it was good - he thought the potential pitfalls (a la the British idle rich) were an interesting problem that the world would just have to learn to deal with. He just assumed it would happen.
On the health issue - most of the studies I've seen cap the health benefits of working at a few hours a week. Volunteering for an hour a day seems to be just as beneficial as spending most of your waking hours on an office job.
Doesn't it seem that the rising "unemployable" cohort having all that free time, and the wealthy having none is not somehow related? "Unemployable" seems perjorative, so let's use Arnold Kling's ( Tyler Cowan's?) ZMP ( Zero Marginal Product ) workers.
You get the feeling that in years past, the ZMP would have been given some measure of slack, and allowed to work their way into a more productive status. But that's what's changed. I think there's been a cultural shift - look at the relatively unpleasant reports on how peoples jobs are now. Plus, unemployment ( especially if you're of an age to live with parents in their McMansion or even your old bedroom in a more modest home ) is a lot more comfortable than it used to be.
There's been a long-term trend towards advancing the age at which people join the workforce. People had moral reservations about the abolition of child labor - after all, it had worked out okay for them. It's only when unemployment began to be a more palpable problem that the mores concerning child labor shifted. Even then, my own father was pressed into service as farm labor as recently as the 1940s. This was standard.
As production has become less and less labor intensive, the workplace becomes more and more about social signalling. And as the population of firms becomes increasingly about maintaining old guard products and services and less about actually advancing the footprint of the firm from within ( with low cost financing enabling M&A activity instead ) firms are rapidly shedding workers. You don't even need offshoring or Chinese production to explain this. All you need is the Jack Welch "neutron bomb" effect.
We see increasingly ambitious tech efforts, not the sort of thing a half dozen people can do in a year or two, to sell for a few million.
But mainly, as the workplace becomes overtly inhospitable and the cost of slacking goes down, the equilibrium shifts.
I don't think the article made an implicit assumption that more leisure is good. The article appears to be using self-reported satisfaction statistics:
"And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to"
Not working is not the same as inaction. It is more of the opposite. Unleashing ones creative potential once relieved from the alienating burden of salaried work.
> healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity.
and this is your explicit assumption and also needs justification. a better source than a fluff piece in a daily newspaper would be helpful too.
"productive" is a really loaded and problematic word to use here. why is "production" the moral underpinnings of the good life? surely a healthy person might find fulfillment in any number of different activities regardless of their impact on GDP.
I get this, but it seems to me that the simple converse is that we just happen to presently have the optimal amount of free time, which I don't think is true.
I can think of a few other things the article doesn't touch on that influence me.
1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich.
2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation.
3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).
Also many hourly workers don't get to pick their own hours. I know when I was stocking shelves, I only got to work the hours my manager scheduled me for. If I wanted to work more hours to make more money, I didn't have that option. I've got a friend who is a mechanic as well, and it's the same thing there. He only gets to work extra if they have extra work. If they don't have work for him, he goes home (and clocks out).
I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
I think your point #2 is right on. This article is wondering why recent observations are not behaving the "backward bending supply curve of labour" [1]. But this curve assumes a constant return on hours worked (i.e. a constant wage). If it really behaves more like overtime -- where additional hours are worth more but only if you've already worked a certain amount -- then the marginal hourly wage can rise as the marginal leisure value rises, and the equilibrium is pushed further out. In other words, it changes that curve to strictly increasing.
Your comment touches on how this happens, but not why.
If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours?
I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
When you get rich, your life becomes much more interesting - You get more opportunities and you get 'lucky' more often. Also, your work actually makes your feel good about yourself. In effect, life feels like a game; you actually get to win from time to time.
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
I wonder if my theory explains why games are so popular these days (and so lucrative).
Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
Very interesting theory - I think I agree. I would add though that a good portion of the causality is going the other way, where people who find work fun and stimulating become more successful, and those who are bored by it stay poor.
These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
"When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life."
I know a lot of poor people that have interesting jobs, super-cool trips during their 7 weeks of vacation (French here :-) ). I have colleagues at my well-paid software engineering US office that have delayed their "dream" 3 weeks vacation for years now. Who is happier here ?
"Life feels like a game" really resonates with me. I've actually used that phrase before. I don't play video games much because I find tons of math and programming stuff fun and interesting. So I just "let" myself pursue those interests, and thankfully, those interests happen to be financially rewarding.
I read this piece and was very saddened. Take it from someone who has been around a few more years than many others who contribute to this site. There is nothing good - long-term - about sitting around idle for extended periods. It kills your initiative. It kills your character. It kills your options in life. It kills your soul. I saw this happen to several people who were very close to me growing up and I still grieve at what they suffered in later years as the price paid for the extreme short cuts and high life of their youth. And this survey fact as reported in this piece - that is, of one in five non-college-educated young men in their twenties being so very much out of work for sustained periods - is not cause for celebration or for launching into philosophical discussions about the value of leisure in a developed society. It is instead a real tragedy, and I don’t care how many survey participants check a box attesting that, for the moment, they can say they have had lots of fun doing pretty much nothing beyond partying and playing games over the past 12 months or more. I know that today it can often happen that there are very limited options in the workplace and this so-called leisure is really an enforced leisure not of people’s own choosing. But that does not mean we should rationalize this to say that, after all, they do seem to be satisfied in their leisure. That is nothing more than a superficial covering-up of a bad situation. It is decidedly unhealthy for the individuals involved and for society as a whole to have large numbers of young men involuntarily idled for sustained periods in this way (wasn’t that what we used to call the Great Depression). Work is not an evil. It is a big part of how we grow and develop as people. It is a big part of how we negotiate life. Let us hope there comes a day ahead when enforced “leisure” is no longer a norm and the leisure people enjoy is of their own choosing.
You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy.
But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything!
What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character.
But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.
My experience has been that a great amount of work is simply idle. Forced idleness. Survive this for 40 hours a week. Factory work: Do these things over and over. Retail cashier? Do this over and over while some of these people treat you badly, including management. Fast food is worse. I worked in a call center once - inbound collections for a phone company and heard horror stories about how soul-sucking telemarketing was. There isn't much personal growth in many of these: I'd say that by the time one works 40 hours in some of these jobs and takes care of one's needs (and family), there just isn't any room left. And it isn't like there is much flexibility - you are expected to put the job first.
This is precisely why I didn't want to work in a factory when I was young. I lived in a town surrounded by the shells of people that used to have life in them, but after 20-40 years of boredom, repetition, and merely being a piece of the machine had severe effects.
Work may not be an evil in itself, but the culture of it really can be and most work out there simply isn't a rewarding experience outside of getting money. I'm not convinced that this sort of idleness is preferable outside of having money.
If the culture should change, it might be different. Encourage outside life, make policies so that folks can have family time and take care of them, discourage overtime: make sure folks have wages and free time enough that they can do something after taking care of things they need. This won't fix the horribleness of some jobs, but it will trap folks a little less.
What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
There is a difference in what the article presents as an escape for young men with no job vs someone who plays games in the evening to relax.
That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.
I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.
I remember coming home for Christmas/summer vacation while in college. I was good for about 10 days, enjoying my leisure. But then I wanted to get back to work. Leisure is boring.
The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
I think what's missing is how much more engrossing higher paying jobs are. Working on processing lines or customer service, you completely check out mentally. I wouldn't have been able to bear the thought of working more than I have to.
But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field.
So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.
The executive function of the brain involves decision making and creativity. Many blue collar jobs are repetitive of just following a standard operating procedure over and over. It becomes taxing and creates an intrinsic limit to how much can be done. With many white collar jobs especially when promoted to higher levels of management and autonomy, the pleasure involved with decision-making makes work as rewarding as playing that game plus there's a monetary reward. The basic premise of the article is that if the undereducated people were afforded similar opportunities than we may have a different situation.
The article points out a possible interesting reason why crime dropped around 1990 all over the developed world.
"So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown."
Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.
The author avoids an obvious arrow of causality: some people like work, which causes those people to work hard, which is more likely to make them rich.
There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox.
It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.
I'd add another factor the author did not mention: the market in which those "Elite U.S. men" compete is vastly more competitive than it was a generation ago.
I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.
> “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.
> The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least.
Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes.
Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)
Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field.
The one who loves money is never satisfied with money,
Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke.
The more loot you get, the more looters show up.
And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight?
Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep,
Whether supper is beans or steak.
But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia.
Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen:
A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him
And then loses it all in a bad business deal.
He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him.
He arrived naked from the womb of his mother;
He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing.
This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went.
So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke?
All for a miserable life spent in the dark?
Economists have studied this kind of thing for a long time.
From Wikipedia:
"
In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1]
The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time.
Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time
"
This points out another issue with providing basic income -- while basic income is preferable to just letting people starve and probably better than expensive-to-administer welfare programs, it does not provide a substitute source for people's self worth.
For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.
Honestly I feel like a lot of this is social. I'm motivated to go and work because my peers all do that to and it's been that way since I was a kid. People I knew in high school went to college. Now my college peers are getting jobs, etc...
Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of.
On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.
1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded.
2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan.
3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.
I think gamer culture is a vast invisible swath of humanity. If you look at the communities on Twitch or YouTube around certain popular games, it's pretty clear that billions of human hours are poured into gaming.
[+] [-] forrestbrazeal|9 years ago|reply
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...
[+] [-] adrusi|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that people don't know how to use their free time, and so it ends up spent getting high and watching TV. Maybe people would be better at exploiting the time they have if they were allowed free time earlier in life. Kids are pretty good at taking advantage of the time they have, maybe if they were allowed to keep more freedom through to adulthood they'd keep the skill. Maybe if our non-free time weren't so stressful we wouldn't feel the need to use our free time just to unwind. Or maybe its that entertainment has gotten too compelling. I'd rather not believe that people have an innate need to be forced to do whatever they do.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|9 years ago|reply
I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
[+] [-] pystack|9 years ago|reply
Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.
My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.
[+] [-] taurath|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azernik|9 years ago|reply
On the health issue - most of the studies I've seen cap the health benefits of working at a few hours a week. Volunteering for an hour a day seems to be just as beneficial as spending most of your waking hours on an office job.
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|9 years ago|reply
You get the feeling that in years past, the ZMP would have been given some measure of slack, and allowed to work their way into a more productive status. But that's what's changed. I think there's been a cultural shift - look at the relatively unpleasant reports on how peoples jobs are now. Plus, unemployment ( especially if you're of an age to live with parents in their McMansion or even your old bedroom in a more modest home ) is a lot more comfortable than it used to be.
There's been a long-term trend towards advancing the age at which people join the workforce. People had moral reservations about the abolition of child labor - after all, it had worked out okay for them. It's only when unemployment began to be a more palpable problem that the mores concerning child labor shifted. Even then, my own father was pressed into service as farm labor as recently as the 1940s. This was standard.
As production has become less and less labor intensive, the workplace becomes more and more about social signalling. And as the population of firms becomes increasingly about maintaining old guard products and services and less about actually advancing the footprint of the firm from within ( with low cost financing enabling M&A activity instead ) firms are rapidly shedding workers. You don't even need offshoring or Chinese production to explain this. All you need is the Jack Welch "neutron bomb" effect.
We see increasingly ambitious tech efforts, not the sort of thing a half dozen people can do in a year or two, to sell for a few million.
But mainly, as the workplace becomes overtly inhospitable and the cost of slacking goes down, the equilibrium shifts.
[+] [-] lukewink|9 years ago|reply
"And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to"
[+] [-] city41|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arximboldi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphmedia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
and this is your explicit assumption and also needs justification. a better source than a fluff piece in a daily newspaper would be helpful too.
"productive" is a really loaded and problematic word to use here. why is "production" the moral underpinnings of the good life? surely a healthy person might find fulfillment in any number of different activities regardless of their impact on GDP.
[+] [-] lawpoop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aluhut|9 years ago|reply
I would study philosophy if I could afford it. Travel a lot. Go swimming more so my back would not be such a mess and so on.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be bad for my brain.
[+] [-] chollida1|9 years ago|reply
1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich.
2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation.
3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
[+] [-] connoredel|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
[+] [-] forgetsusername|9 years ago|reply
If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours?
I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
[+] [-] carleverett|9 years ago|reply
These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|9 years ago|reply
I know a lot of poor people that have interesting jobs, super-cool trips during their 7 weeks of vacation (French here :-) ). I have colleagues at my well-paid software engineering US office that have delayed their "dream" 3 weeks vacation for years now. Who is happier here ?
[+] [-] calebm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbilly|9 years ago|reply
Research has shown that past the subsistence level, increases in income don't correlate with increased happiness.
[+] [-] panic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grellas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|9 years ago|reply
You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy.
But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything!
What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character.
But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|9 years ago|reply
This is precisely why I didn't want to work in a factory when I was young. I lived in a town surrounded by the shells of people that used to have life in them, but after 20-40 years of boredom, repetition, and merely being a piece of the machine had severe effects.
Work may not be an evil in itself, but the culture of it really can be and most work out there simply isn't a rewarding experience outside of getting money. I'm not convinced that this sort of idleness is preferable outside of having money.
If the culture should change, it might be different. Encourage outside life, make policies so that folks can have family time and take care of them, discourage overtime: make sure folks have wages and free time enough that they can do something after taking care of things they need. This won't fix the horribleness of some jobs, but it will trap folks a little less.
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|9 years ago|reply
What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
[+] [-] Leon|9 years ago|reply
That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.
I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.
[+] [-] seangrogg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swagasaurus-rex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 years ago|reply
The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
[+] [-] legitster|9 years ago|reply
But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field.
So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.
[+] [-] orky56|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sien|9 years ago|reply
"So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown."
Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.
[+] [-] tlb|9 years ago|reply
There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox.
It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.
[+] [-] tapp|9 years ago|reply
I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|9 years ago|reply
> “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.
[+] [-] grn|9 years ago|reply
Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes.
Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)
[+] [-] hprotagonist|9 years ago|reply
Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field.
The one who loves money is never satisfied with money, Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke.
The more loot you get, the more looters show up. And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight?
Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep, Whether supper is beans or steak. But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia.
Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen: A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him And then loses it all in a bad business deal. He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him. He arrived naked from the womb of his mother; He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing. This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went. So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke? All for a miserable life spent in the dark?
-- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&...
[+] [-] octaveguin|9 years ago|reply
That's quite an interesting thing to say that is super true. Consumption of too much media is now a sign of low class status.
[+] [-] yitchelle|9 years ago|reply
"In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,”
"Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown"
Doing some quick maths put 15% of lower skilled men are playing video games all day during their idle time. Is this really happening on the ground?
[+] [-] tuna-piano|9 years ago|reply
From Wikipedia: " In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1]
The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time.
Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time "
Check out this Wikipedia page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallnamespace|9 years ago|reply
For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.
[+] [-] plandis|9 years ago|reply
Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of.
On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.
[+] [-] squozzer|9 years ago|reply
1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded.
2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan.
3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.
[+] [-] narrator|9 years ago|reply